"Visiting the women's peace camp at Greenham Common," wrote a journalist in early December, "a certain effort of imagination is needed to see what an inspiration it has become to the peace movement." Indeed, looking at the muddy paths, the flapping plastic used for shelter from the rain, the straw bales used for seats, and the blackened kettle perched lopsidedly on the fire, it is much easier to understand how for so long the camp was either virtually ignored by the media or treated as slightly eccentric.
But the arrest of 23 women who occupied a sentry box at the base and of 11 others who laid in front of vehicles bringing sewage pipes for construction there made national news. And when more than 30,000 women stood shoulder-to-shoulder "embracing" the base on December 12, 1982, their action made headlines all over the world. The spark of hope represented by the women's peace camp has set fire to a women's peace movement that is likely to remain burning for a long time to come.
The remarkable story of women's resistance at Greenham Common properly begins in the late summer of 1981, when a group calling itself "Women for Life on Earth" set off on a 125-mile march from Cardiff, Wales, to the Greenham Common air base, an active U.S. military base in southern England. The women were trying to get a televised debate on the Ministry of Defense's plans to site 96 cruise missiles at Greenham Common. The missiles are scheduled for arrival in December of this year.
But the women received little attention in the press. Even chaining themselves to the fence of the Greenham Common base elicited no debate, so they stayed. They set up tents, borrowed camping trailers, built teepees, and began receiving daily deliveries of milk, mail, and bread.
One bitter winter and several evictions later, women are still maintaining a presence at the base. The camp is a visible reminder of the government's nuclear war preparations, and it has prompted many similar protest actions. By the summer of 1982, at least nine active peace camps had been pitched at weapons sites in Britain, and several other women's peace camps had been set up in the Netherlands and Switzerland.
The hardships of primitive living and maintaining a 24-hour form of protest meant that many of the camp's founders could not stay at Greenham Common. But they were followed by others, and over the months hundreds, even thousands, of women passed through the peace camp. One who stayed was Helen John, a former midwife, who found that as a women's community the camp became a source of empowerment and support.
"Many of the women associated with the camp had never taken a strong line on anything in their lives before," she explained. "Many of us didn't feel we had enough experience or understanding of situations around us to express our opinions. But gradually we gained confidence, and that chain reaction has continued."
That chain reaction drew in women of all kinds, from feminists to Tory conservatives, from the mystically inclined to the politically dedicated. Many left jobs, studies, and husbands to spend time in the camp. As a camp leaflet proclaims, "For centuries, women have watched men go off to war: now women are leaving home for peace."
When the women survived the first winter, the local town council started taking the peace camp more seriously. A "Festival of Life," organized by the women in March, 1982, was attended by several thousand people, and the council stepped up eviction proceedings. When the eviction order came in May, the women quickly moved their tents and trailers to Department of Transportation land less than 100 feet away, but not before a wood and plastic structure they had built as a gathering place was bulldozed away. In September the women were evicted from their new location and forbidden to erect any structures on the site. In an action clearly intended to discourage the women from returning, loads of boulders were dumped where' the camp had stood.
In response to such power-tactics by the authorities, the women have developed tactics of their own, such as spinning webs of yarn on the perimeter fence to remind those inside of their presence. Recently, wool webs have been used to entangle machinery, to string supine protesters together, and to baffle police officers trained to make baton charges but not to unpick knitting. Helen John calls such tactics "the politics of whimsy." This, she says, is "a light-hearted approach to a very serious subject. It unlocks people's fears. Once you look at something you've been taught to believe has complete power over you, you find it hasn't the power you thought."
Soon after Christmas, a group of women from the peace camp penetrated the security of the base by attending a disco organized by the American servicemen, which was open to the public. In suitable disco garb the women were totally unrecognizable as the heavily-booted protesters usually seen sitting around the fire at the camp. Once inside, the women immediately set about their missionary task of converting the GI's from the cruise missiles.
The women's presence posed a problem for the servicemen, who have been specifically ordered not to have contact with people from the peace camp. When asked to leave, the women responded that they had come to dance and enjoy themselves. As they were leaving, one woman asked a guard at the gate whether he knew the camp was a target for a nuclear holocaust. "No comment," was the reply.
Planning for a December 12 demonstration at the Greenham Common base began in early autumn. December 12 has a special meaning for Greenham Common, as it is the anniversary of the day in 1979 when NATO ministers approved the decision to deploy 572 cruise and Pershing II missiles in Europe, beginning in Britain. Modeling the demonstration on last year's women's festival and actions at the Pentagon in the U.S., the action was divided into two phases of protest and resistance: embrace the base on Sunday, close the base on Monday.
When Sunday came no one knew whether there would really be enough women to surround the entire nine-mile perimeter of the base, and the women were instructed to bring along scarves, wool, or ribbons to extend their arms. Among the first arrivals were six bus loads of women from Edinburgh, Scotland, who had set off at 10 p.m. the night before. It was snowing hard that morning, and the organizers feared that many people would be put off from coming to the demonstration. But by noon the weather had cleared somewhat, and the area was getting jammed with more than 60 buses and thousands of cars. Some people had to walk three miles to reach the base.
For the organizers the turnout was a complete surprise. They had hoped for 12,000; they got more than 30,000. If any of the women from the peace camp were still wondering whether the primitive sanitation and perpetually wet clothes they had endured had been worth it, the answer came in a chorus of women singing the peace camp song:
You can't kill the Spirit,
She is like a mountain,
Old and strong,
She goes on and on and on...
The women who came were asked to attach some token from their lives to the nine-foot high fence surrounding the base to show that they had been there. All along the nine miles of fence were hung posters, baby pictures, balloons, poems about peace, baby clothes, diapers, Teddy bears, and the omnipresent webs of yarn. A more radical feminist spirit was at work in some signs, such as one reading, "Men Beware. Angry Women Everywhere."
Men were not entirely excluded from the demonstration, but were confined to the "Children's Gate," where they were responsible for daycare and fixing the lunch. With conveyor-belt speed the men produced 3,000 marmite sandwiches on wholewheat bread to be distributed free to the needy. While Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) Chairwoman Joan Ruddock joined the "living chain" of women, CND Secretary Monsignor Bruce Kent spent the day pouring tea. CND supported the women's action with funds for walkie-talkies and some administrative assistance.
Most of the women left at the end of the activities on Sunday, but between one and two thousand remained there overnight. They slept across the eight entrances to the base in preparation for "closing" the base the next morning. Aware of the women's plan, police started moving several buses into the base before 7 a.m., and the rest of the day was a tactical battle between the women, who used walkie-talkies to call reinforcements to blockade active gates, and the police, who sealed off part of the perimeter road to prevent women from traveling around by minibus.
At noon police were eventually able to get a military convoy through Gate Six, using a force of 400 police, and soon afterward every available police man and woman was required to get another convoy out of Gate Four. Police were instructed not to make arrests, so after being dragged aside, the women flung themselves back down on the road, some as many as 14 times. Both the police and the women were covered in mud.
At the end of the day, only two women and one man had been arrested. One of the residents of the peace camp said she felt that the day had been a success because work at the base had been disrupted. She added, "We are confident now that there are enough committed women in this country to stop cruise missiles coming to the base."
With the new missiles scheduled for delivery at the end of the year, 1983 has been dubbed the"Year of Nonviolent Direct Action" in the British peace movement, and the move toward direct action tactics is evident in other European countries as well. While the 30,000 women were gathering at Greenham Common, 3,300 activists were taking part in nonviolent actions and demonstrations at more than 50 different nuclear weapons sites in West Germany. Some 300 people were arrested in these actions, most of them at a blockade of NATO command headquarters in Stuttgart.
As little as a year ago it would have been almost inconceivable that such widespread nonviolent actions could be organized and coordinated in Germany, where violent confrontations between demonstrators and police had become the norm. But the widely publicized success of an eight-day nonviolent blockade of a missile base in Grossengstingen last summer brought nonviolent strategies into popular favor. While there are now some 100 active nonviolence trainers in Germany, they could have used 50 more to fill all the requests for training surrounding the December 12 actions.
In the past year, formal relationships with nonviolence trainers' collectives have been established by both the Green Party in Germany and CND in Britain. The next round of direct actions is being planned for Easter in Britain and Germany. In the Sicilian town of Comiso, where 112 cruise missiles are to be installed, resistance is being directed from a small but active peace camp, which has recently moved into an apartment in the town itself. In Belgium and the Netherlands, interest in civil disobedience is also growing, though popular opposition to the new missiles is already so strong that a final decision to accept them may be indefinitely postponed by both governments.
It will not be "business as usual" for the advocates of nuclear weapons in Europe this year. Back at Greenham Common, 40 women at the peace camp inaugurated the year of nonviolent direct action by occupying one of the new cruise missile bunkers on New Year's day. As dawn was breaking, the women threw carpets over the barbed wire fence and climbed into the base.
When they attained the top of the bunker, the women burst into song and dance before being arrested and carried away. The women said they were responding to speeded-up construction work at the base and rumors in the press about cruise missile installation being moved up to April. But whenever the missiles come, one thing is clear: the Greenham Common women with their "politics of whimsy" will be stirring up nonviolent trouble until it is certain that the missiles are gone.
Joe Peacock was a Quaker engaged in disarmament work for the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) in Holland, through the Brethren Volunteer Service when this article appeared. He had visited peace camps in Britain, the Netherlands, and Sicily.
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